2 Corinthians 1

2 Corinthians 1:1-2

Division 1. (2 Corinthians 1:1-24; 2 Corinthians 2:1-17.)The unity of the body as recognized of God in the control of all that relates to every part for the good of the whole. The importance of the first division is plainly seen here. It is an introduction to that which follows, and puts us upon the right track for the interpretation of all that follows. It is very striking, therefore, to find here insisted on, the unity of the assembly as recognized of God in the trial of all that happens with regard to any of the members of the body, making them thus more fruitful in their service to the rest. It is immensely important that we should get the idea of ministry which thus results. The tendency has been -while no Christian surely would deny that service in some sort belongs to all the people of God -yet to make what is commonly called ministry too much the service of a class, and official. We need, all of us, to wake up fully to the fact that ministry is nothing else than that service of Christ in all our life, to which we are pledged by the very fact that we are Christians.

It is not by any choice of ours that we have been baptized by the Spirit into the one body of Christ. Our place and necessary duty in relation to all other members is thus clear.

We may indeed have to ask ourselves what is our own distinct function in this way, -a question which we shall not answer by looking simply at ourselves and seeking to define it by such an examination. Love, as the apostle has already taught us, is the spirit of ministry. It is that which makes us servants as a matter of course to the needs of others, and here there is no restrictive band thrown around us to hinder the free motion of love. It is as we are led out to help in whatever way we may find ourselves able to help, that that ability on our part becomes more and more known to ourselves, and we fall more intelligently into the place which God has given us. Officialism has always been a restraint upon this mutual service. A large number have thus been systematically deprived of even the very opportunity of knowing what their gifts might be; and the blessing which God would thus have given us has been limited, and, as far as we could do it, forfeited by us. The heart is that which will teach us here better than the head, and love is not the blind thing which men have painted it, but, on the contrary, that which is the very key to wisdom. “He that winneth souls is wise.” The desire to do this will make us to seek out ways of doing it which will soon justify themselves, or find needed correction in the field of service itself.

1. The apostle associates himself in his address to the Corinthians now, in his constant, gracious way, with the brother Timotheus; while he has to maintain, in the state of things which we know was at Corinth, his own distinct apostleship by the will of God. He writes, therefore, with authority, not simply by way of advice; and we see, in fact, all the way through the epistle, how he claims this authority, while desiring to use it with all the gentleness of grace. He writes to the assembly at Corinth, but with a larger reference also to all the saints who were in all Achaia, wishing them in the first place, as that which would qualify for all that he will urge upon them here, “grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Grace is, as we know, our fundamental need, as well as that in which we stand with God, and peace is that which may well be our possession as we realize the grace in which we stand; but there is also a peace which flows from communion with the Father and with the Son, and which is essential, therefore, to all Christian walk. The apostle writes as full of the comfort with which the news which he has just got from Corinth inspires him. He blesses the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as “the Father of compassion and the God of all encouragement,” and immediately gives us in this way a key-note of the epistle: “For God encourageth us,” he says, “in all our tribulation, that we may be able to encourage those who are in any tribulation through the encouragement wherewith we ourselves are encouraged of God.” How beautiful is the fruitfulness of sorrow thus for us, as that which only makes us more deeply to realize God as a living God and the way in which He cares and ministers to us all! God is, after all, the great Minister. We are only imitators of God in this way, feeble as we are. It is ministry upon which every one of us depends, a ministry in which He may use and does use his people, and in which also the very circumstances of the way, however adverse they may seem, are nevertheless made all to work together for good to them that love God. How conscious we must be, if we have any right Christian experience at all, of the effect of trouble thus upon us, of how, when we draw near to God by means of it, He becomes truly more the living God, to be counted upon for all our need!

The trouble of which he speaks is that which has resulted to him from the place which was his in the world as devoted to Christ. The sufferings of Christ abounded to one to whom to live was Christ and nothing else.

It is not disciplinary suffering that he is speaking of, therefore; although it is true that, perhaps, in all suffering even where the highest privilege is found, nevertheless we are such that discipline may be in it, perhaps is commonly in it, and is part of its blessing. But that is not what is spoken of here. If the suffering of Christ abounded to him, so in proportion did his encouragement through Christ abound also. Both things, the trouble and the encouragement, were not simply for himself, but for all Christians also. Their encouragement would be found in endurance of the same sufferings, and their salvation or deliverance out of them was the crown of his suffering. From it in due time the deliverance came. It is here that is found the ability for helping one another upon the basis of such common suffering and such experiences of the goodness and power of God. He had a stedfast hope with regard to them, an assurance that all this trial would work but blessing in regard to them, and now his own present encouragement by them would have its reflex influence upon them, for their own encouragement and as working out their deliverance also. If they were partakers of the sufferings on the one hand, they would be also of the encouragement on the other. Thus God has united His people together. 2. The apostle goes on to speak more of the trouble in which he had lately been, and of the effect upon himself, an effect which God would always produce in us from trial of this sort. He had been pressed exceedingly, beyond his own power to sustain it. Life itself he had given up as hopeless; but when God brought him down to this, and when the sentence of death, as it were, was written upon him, it was only that God might manifest Himself as the God of resurrection, a God acting in power beyond all thoughts of man, whatever the circumstances may be. The apostle had found deliverance. Assurance had been confirmed with him that God would always deliver him.

He trusted Him for this, therefore, while recognizing the value of the prayers of the saints on his behalf, prayers which were already thus a manifest form of ministry to him; and the result with God would consequently be, in the grace bestowed upon him, thanksgiving on the part of many in his behalf. In seeing this, he is comforted by the assurance, the testimony of his own conscience, that in holiness and sincerity before God he had behaved himself in the world and even especially towards them. They were already recognizing this; and he wrote nothing else than he was sure they would recognize, and that he was their glorying, as they too were his in the coming day of the Lord Jesus. 3. He goes on now to speak of what might seem to have been a failure upon his part. He had been minded to come to them before this, to pass by them into Macedonia, and again to come from Macedonia to them, that they might set him afterward on his way to Judea; but in fact he had not done this. Had that been mere fickleness on his part, so that what he purposed today he would set aside to morrow? Was there, in this way, a kind of yea and nay with him, as earnest a nay as the yea before might seem to be earnest? He desires to rid them of any thought of this kind; and it is beautiful to see how he insists that his life took character from his preaching, even in such details as he is speaking of.

The Son of God who had been preached among them by himself and Silas and Timotheus was He preached as One in whom there was yea and nay, the author of a mere conditional and uncertain blessing? Assuredly not. All in Him was certainty; all the promises of God were in Him yea, in affirmation; and in Him too amen, in the answer of faith and experience to His assurance; that God might have His due glory as alone He could in this way. As to the position of the Christian, God had established them all together in Christ, with whom there could be no failure. Salvation was in His hands and in no other. He had complete control of all circumstances, and grace to meet all possible necessities.

Then, too, the power answering to this, the power of the Spirit, had been manifest. They were anointed thus and sealed. The power communicated had marked them out in the fullest way as those who belonged to God, and thus secured His coming in on behalf of those who were His representatives upon the earth. The Spirit Himself was thus the pledge and earnest of the future in their hearts. Here all was certainty. Nothing was merely contingent.

Nothing depended upon man, whatever shape God’s grace might have to take in view of human frailty and uncertainty. 4. He goes on to explain the real reason for this apparent failure. It was to spare them that he had not come to Corinth. Their state was such that he was afraid of having to exercise apostolic authority in a manner that might seem to make him lord rather than servant. His absence from them was the fruit of his love toward them. It was to call into exercise the faith in which they stood.

They were to act in the responsibility which was their own, and he left them free to act thus. Nor was it his mind to come to them again in grief. They were the very people who in their prosperity made him glad. Why should he be anxious to grieve them? And the object of his writing now was also that he might not have grief from those in whom he ought to rejoice. He had confidence also on his own part now, that his joy was really the joy of all of them.

His previous epistle, with all the touch of severity that might be in it, was only the witness of the love which he had more abundantly towards them, and which was working for their blessing in this way. 5. The apostle now takes up the case of discipline to which he had to exhort them in the previous epistle. The sorrow which had been in his heart was really theirs as well as his, and he did not want them now to press his part in it in such a way as to hinder the manifestation of their love, which should be when this sorrow of theirs had taken effect in the breaking down of the offender. They had need now to show grace and encourage, for fear the one in question should be swallowed up with the excessive grief which he seemed to be manifesting. It is quite possible for us to go from the extreme of laxity to the extreme of rigidity, these things both springing really out of a lack of true love, which can neither, on the one hand, make light of the evil, nor on the other, lose sight of its object, which is to win the sinner from his sin. He could, therefore, now exhort them to assure this person of their love; and here he desired that they would be as obedient to the word from him as they had been obedient before in the active discipline itself.

If they forgave anything, he too forgave. He was with them in it and as the representative of Christ also in his apostolic character, forgiveness indeed being the very triumph of grace over sin and the triumph over Satan too, in whose hands the offender had been put, but who would seek now to drive him to despair, and so to get an advantage over the flock of Christ Himself. Such were his devices, of which Christians should not be ignorant. 6. He goes back now to speak of his own personal exercises in relation to them. He had come to Troas for the gospel of Christ, and a door had been there opened to him by the Lord; yet his anxiety with regard to Corinth would not permit him to remain there. He did not find Titus as he expected, who had been sent to them, and his anxiety was such that he left even this open door and departed into Macedonia to find news of them. He does not pronounce upon this whether, after all, it had been the Lord’s mind that he should depart; but there could be no question how, with such an one as the apostle, it manifested his anxiety on their behalf; but God had come in. Everywhere he found it so. God was always leading in triumph in Christ. He does not say, “maketh us to triumph,” exactly.

The triumph was that of God Himself, God who had unfailing interest in all that belonged to Christ, and who manifested it thus in those who were identified with Him upon earth. Through them He was making Manifest the savor of His knowledge in every place; and this, too, where the gospel might seem not to be a success, as where it was manifestly such: in those that were being saved and in those that were perishing. Those who preached it were still a sweet savor of Christ to God; and He delighted in the publication of His power and grace in Him; Christ always a sweet savor to Him, even though it might be in result to those who rejected Christ only a savor of death, the anticipation of worse death, -on the other hand, a savor of life unto life to those who accepted it. Who then was sufficient for such things as these? Their sufficiency had manifestly to be of God Himself, who was the great preacher of Christ in the power of His Spirit, who had come to glorify Him at all times. Yet the human instrumentality was not set aside by this, but confirmed rather; and it required, on the part of those whom God was thus using, that earnest sincerity which was of God; who did not make, therefore, a trade of the word of God, converting it into a means of following out their own self-interest, but who, in the presence of God, where Christ was, spoke in His Name.